Screening Log: The Guatemalan Handshake (Todd Rohal, 2006)

Coming on like David Gordon Green with Tourette's (and I suspect you now know whether or not you will ever see this movie), The Guatemalan Handshake is set in some lovely lost rural America, shot in a widescreen frame with an appreciation for stillness — preparing the grounds about equally for transcendence, deadpan, and outbursts of quirk.

To outline the plot is to suggest a bit of both: the movie's narrated by a young girl named Turkeylegs who hangs out at the house of the elderly Mr. Turnupseed, father of her only friend, twentysomething Donald (Will Oldham), who wanders off at the beginning of the movie (having borrowed his dad's beloved red, triangular car), leaving them and his pregnant girlfriend in the lurch. There's a roller rink and a demolition derby, flickering lights and a lost dog.

The supporting cast, which seems designed around childhood-memory caricatures of small-town oddballs, twitches and sputters; the whole thing sometimes feels like a not particularly interesting indiewood quirk show, but Rohal manages a tone of vague melancholy (and a few laugh-out-loud offhand bits), and it's possible to see all the weirdness as an honest, sideways grasp at magic. I've never seen anything quite like the moment when the white-haired Ms. Ethel Firecracker, sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper by the morning sun out the window at her back, lets out a small "Oh!", and Rohal cuts to close-up of her own obituary. (The obituary, wonderfully, lists the cause of her death as simply, "complications.")

The Guatemalan Handshake is available on a gorgeous 2-disc DVD from the new label Benten Films, run by the critics Aaron Hillis and Andrew Grant; Benten's also released DVDs of American independent films by Joe Swanburg and (director-to-watch) Aaron Katz. (The progression on Benten's spine numbers — from digital D.I.Y. and improvised dialogue to off-the-cuff eloquence to careful cinematography and longer-gestating scripts and storyboards — seems to mirror the career trajectory of the directors and movement they feature.)